Completed in late 2025, the campus is revitalising the centre of Perth, bringing fresh energy to the city’s business, cultural, and entertainment districts at the heart of the city in a former industrial brownfield site. ECU City stands out among Australian university campuses for its unique, multi-level integration within the inner-city fabric.

Haworth Tompkins worked with Australian Partners Lyons and Silver Thomas Hanley Architects, on an initial overall campus masterplan, with Haworth Tompkins leading on the accommodation for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). The new WAAPA activates the northern block of the City Campus site, with a dynamic and welcoming entrance drawing in a diverse group of theatre patrons, visiting artists, university students and members of the community.

The WAAPA spaces feature state-of-the-art learning, engagement and performance spaces giving students and staff access to learn, teach, create and perform in world-class spaces. Foyers run up through the building at multiple levels, incorporating flexible bars, cafes and catering facilities. These adaptable spaces are designed for cross-arts use, with infrastructure to support student learning, exhibitions and public performances.

Five new state of the art performance venues - a recital hall for full orchestral performance, a dance theatre, a playhouse theatre with an orchestra pit and fly tower, a jazz & contemporary music venue, a flexible drama theatre, an orchestra rehearsal room with flexible seating for use as an ensemble performance space, and a drama rehearsal room fitted with immersive digital projection and surround-sound capacity for immersive shows.

The Concert Hall is designed as a finely tuned room to bring together a full orchestra and audience in a resonant, energised space, capable of being daylit through a large window onto the city, or in darkness with a large projection screen. Audience wraps the orchestra on 3 sides for most performances, but the room can also occasionally be transformed into a flat floor space for unconventional performance and very large rehearsals. The room is lined in timber panels and timber framing to give a precise, warm acoustic. Side wall panels are hinged to reveal soft fabric to allow the room acoustic to be adjusted. Timber columns crisscross and fold over onto the ceiling, across and down the opposite wall, bringing the room together into a single acoustic musical box.

Australian species timber linings are used throughout, bringing warmth and continuity to the WAAPA spaces. It is used in a different way in each venue, from structural columns and rafters in the Recital Hall to the slatted horseshoe balcony in the Playhouse. Perforated, slatted and angled timber fine tune the acoustics to giving the best experience for audiences and performers throughout.

These venues enable WAAPA to stage the full spectrum of their performing arts work in professional world class venues and develop an ambitious new artistic, research and educational programme.

A series of teaching spaces, ranging from large rehearsal rooms and studios to ensemble and practice rooms, support artistic development for the 1,100 cohort of WAAPA students. Embedding WAAPA into the City Campus will ensure that a diverse range of ECU’s students and Perth’s wider community can experience both “front of house” aspects and “behind the scenes” glimpses of the extraordinary work that happens at this leading conservatoire.

ECU City is located on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people.